


she'll eat you alive

by jonphaedrus



Category: Fire Emblem: Soen no Kiseki/Akatsuki no Megami | Fire Emblem Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn
Genre: F/M, Summer Nagamas 2014, emetophobia mention warning, in-context transphobia, trans headcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-14
Updated: 2014-07-14
Packaged: 2018-02-08 20:16:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1954830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She shaves twice every morning when they’re not at war.</p><p>(title lyrics from <a href="http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107859455277/">eat you alive by the oh hello's</a>)</p>
            </blockquote>





	she'll eat you alive

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silverfoxin](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=silverfoxin).



She shaves twice every morning when they’re not at war. The first time is just to trim, the second time is close—by the end, you could never tell there was any red stubble on her chin. He likes to watch her from the bed as she peers carefully at the vanity mirror by the morning light from the window, eyes narrowed as she searches for any visible red before she paints faint blush on her cheeks and brushes out her long red hair.

 

He’s never understood why she puts so much stock in the blush on her cheeks or the dark charcoal she sometimes lines her eyes with, but he knows she likes it. Haar thinks that Jill is beautiful with or without it, but he lets her do as she pleases. She’s always done that; she always will. Forcing her to change is like trying to control the weather in Daein: it’s never going to do anything you want it to, and it’s more liable to do the one thing you want it to do least. Jill is, and has always been, a force of nature. Changing her is impossible, her changing you is inevitable.

 

 

 

Travelling on deliveries was Jill’s idea, Haar just went along with it because—well, what else was he supposed to do? Left to his own devices after helping to win two wars he would probably just spend all of his time asleep at home, sunning himself with his wyvern, or annoying Jill by doing the above. At least this way she can get him out of the house and off of his ass, even if it still involves him annoying her.

 

In some ways, though, Haar is envious of Ike and Soren. They were smart, he thinks, to get out while they still could. Now, he’s almost certain that they couldn’t just up and leave like they had, after they had come down from the tower and found stone returned to life across the world. Now, people would stop them everywhere, demand that they tell them stories of the war, fawn over them, or flirt with them.

 

The latter, Haar finds, is actually the most annoying. Bragging is sometimes nice. It’s fun, to be part of the force that helped kill the Dragon King and the Black Knight, it’s something that, when they do decide to have children (he faced that inevitability a long time ago) he’s going to be able to pass down to them. But flirting…

 

They’re in some middle-of-nowhere town in rural Begnion, coming back from a visit to one of Sanaki’s many post-war political parties that they somehow always get roped into delivering to (probably because half their friends always show up at those things, and, well, even Tormod isn’t exactly a tyke any more), spending the night at the inn to rest their wyvern’s wings.

 

It’s strange, Haar sometimes thinks, to be riding a wyvern not in full armour. Jill certainly looks good for it, in breeches and a loose shirt that he was almost certain started off as his own, wearing something very nice and red on her lips, her long hair braided up in a bun at the base of her neck while she scratches her chin, lips pursed.

 

“The menu stinks,” she says finally, flopping back in her chair, and Haar reaches for it, leaning heavily on his hand on his bad side, and he looks at the menu with the same kind of lacklustre attention he gives most things that aren’t a) fighting for his life or b) Jill.

 

“Well,” he says finally. “There’s soup.”

 

Jill looks at him, and then stands up. Haar stares up at her, and appreciates how tall she is; one of the tallest women that he’s ever known, nearly the same height her father was in his prime. In her armour she’s imposing, out of her armour she’s just legs all the way down and in all the right places.

 

“I’m going to get a loaf of bread and some cheese.” Travelling food, but better than hard-tac. He’s eaten a lot of hard-tac in his life. Two wars will do that to you; it’s part of how all of them came out of the second one about twenty pounds of fat leaner and twenty pounds of muscle harder. Even he and Jill, despite their constant riding, still became denser after the tower. Haar has lost it, because he’s a lazy slob, but Jill has kept it. She could probably bust melons with her thighs if she tried. He would watch.

 

As she walks through the crowded common room, Haar doesn’t notice something Jill does notice—mostly because it’s on the side where he can’t see. A burly man, watching her. Watching her long red hair and long legs in their breeches with the kind of predatory expression that people usually reserve for a good hot cooked meal right before it’s served.

 

The man gets up, and Haar sees him—too late. The man’s headed for Jill, and he comes up right next to her, stops her in the middle of the room with an outstretched arm. She looks down at him (she’s got more than an inch wearing her riding boots) and raises her eyebrows.

 

“Can I help you?” The altercation has already hushed the common room, and everyone stares. Haar automatically reaches for his spear, or a sword, but he isn’t wearing a sword and he left his spear with his wyvern. It’s peacetime, nominally, at least. He doesn’t think about war at this point. 

 

“Lookin for someone to pay for your drinks, little lady?” The irony of this man, who is probably a woodcutter, telling a blooded Wyvern Lord that she is a  _little lady_  is not at all lost on Haar. He’s pretty sure that if he tried to beat her in an arm-wrestling competition that she would break his arm. There’s a lot of strength belied by her gorgeous legs and curved body. The man leans closer, stretches out an arm.

 

Haar realises moments too late what is about to happen. They’re in a crowded bar, and a quick glance reveals that, aside from the barmaid, Jill’s the only woman there. It’s late at night in the middle of nowhere with rough men.

 

He had wanted a peaceful evening.

 

The man grabs Jill’s breast, and the look on his face is one of mixed horror and revulsion. A moment later, as Jill begins to twist away, he grabs for her crotch and shouts, back-pedalling and swearing. “You ain’t a woman! You  _thing!_ ” And Haar sees Jill’s pretty face twist into an expression of rage that could rival the way Ashnard looked—well, just about all the time. The man looks around and points at her. “That’s a man!”

 

“Disgusting!” Says one jeering catcaller.

 

“Teach him what it means to be a woman!” Shouts another, and Haar starts to stand up, but he gets halfway to his feet before another man grabs Jill by her braid.

 

What happens next shows the difference between people who have faced real, deadly battle, and people who haven’t. Jill twists, slamming her elbow into the second man’s side, and ducks a punch. She grabs the first man by his arm and twists, using her momentum and incredible strength to lift him up over her head and slam him down into the table next to her. The wood cracks under the strength of her throw. Another man comes for her and she spins and kicks him so hard in the side of the head that he twists and goes down and doesn’t move after that, Haar’s not even sure if he’s breathing. Someone pulls a knife, and that’s the point that he stands up the rest of the way.

 

“Hey now,” his quiet, low voice carries in the room, even as Jill grabs the knife, disarms the man, and throws it to stick and quiver in the bar. Everyone else stops, slowly turns to look at Haar.

 

He can’t think of all that many upsides to losing his eye all those years ago, but the one he can think of most is the fact that it makes him pretty damn unforgettable. He’s taller even than Jill is, wearing chainmail and heavy greaves, pauldrons, and vambraces, and he’s only got one eye. Probably every man in the room knows there are wyverns in the stables. A + B = C, and all that.

 

There’s only one man like Haar in all of Tellius, and people familiar with the war he recently helped win know it. A man who has picked up a glass bottle slowly lowers it. The man Jill flipped is sitting up slightly, looking dazedly at Haar. “You.” He points at the man. “Did you touch her? Did you touch my boss’ daughter?” Shiharam might be almost ten years dead, but he was, and always will be, Haar’s mentor. The fact that after Shiharam died Haar got  Jill so technically she’s not just his boss’ daughter but also his girl—not important here.

 

“Ain’t no daughter,” the man says, and Haar nods, looks at Jill. She looks back at him, her red eyes wide and bright. He nods again.

 

“Let’s kick the shit out of them.”

 

Haar throws the first punch, and it knocks the man it hits out cold. Jill grabs a mop from somewhere, and it might not be a spear but she’s plenty near deadly with it, and takes down almost a dozen on her own; the rest of them Haar introduces to the business end of his fist, and he once got pretty damn close to winning an arm wrestling competition where he only lost to Ike in the semifinals, and the man had arms like steaks.

 

Together, they probably take down about twenty people. Haar leaves thrice the amount of the rooms they paid for on the counter for the cowering inkeep, and he and Jill leave without another word.

 

That night, for the first time since she was a child, Jill rides on Haar’s wyvern with him as they head back toward Daein, her Minerva flapping alongside, happy for the lessened burden. Haar’s Adonis does not appreciate the added burden, but takes it. She leans against his chest and holds one of his hands, her thick braid digging into his shoulder where his pauldron isn’t. For a long time, she doesn’t say anything.

 

“Am I disgusting?” Jill asks as they fly through a cloud. Haar leans his chin on her shoulder.

 

“That one time you had food poisoning and you spent two days vomiting you were pretty gross.” Jill elbows him, gently, in the side. Not the same kind of elbow she threw earlier, which had probably broken a rib or two.

 

“Haar.”

 

“You’re fucking gorgeous. Whatever you did to your lips really brings out your hair. Who the hell cares if your breasts are ricebags, because I don’t.” Jill laughs, and it’s whipped away by the wind, but it’s a happy sound. She squeezes his hand.

 

“You don’t care?”

 

“Never did.”

 

Jill’s whatever she wants to be, and that night when they find a small field and land in it and sleep on a pair of piled sleeping rolls, Haar reminds her how much he really doesn’t think that she’s disgusting, or needs to be taught a lesson, and holds her close to him and buries his face in her hair when they’re done, and mumbles the words that he doesn’t like to say because it’s always, almost, too hard.

 

 

 

 

Haar knows, in a sort of abstract way, that eventually people like Jill are going to start fighting wars smaller than the ones that he and Jill fought to help end. When they’re tired of jeering and hate, the same way that the Laguz were, they’re going to rise up and teach everybody to mind their own business and get the fuck out of everybody else’s—they’re going to have a lot of allies, too, because he’s almost certain that Soren will still be alive when it happens, and, Ashera, there was a reason that Soren and Ike ran off into the wilderness and nobody’s seen either of them in a decade. There was a reason that Zelgius died for Sephiran in that tall tower, and there was a reason Ike buried the general while the sage cried.

 

It’s going to be a smaller, crueller war. There probably won’t be goddesses and immortals involved, there won’t be blessed swords (for one thing, Ragnell is gone with Ike, and Sephiran took Alondite from Zelgius’ fallen body and nobody’s seen Heron or sword since), there probably won’t be kings and queens, although there might be—Elincia never having any interest in Ike always piqued Haar’s curiosity.

 

The war’s going to happen eventually, and Jill’s side is going to win. The women who wake up and shave twice every morning and carefully pack their breasts in, tuck themselves away to present a sensible line in their pants. The men who put their penises on, draw on their hairs, speak in lowered voices. They’re going to win.

 

Haar knows that if he and Jill are still alive when that war comes, they’re going to fight it. He’s had enough of wars in two, but this is a battle he’ll fight no matter how and when he has to, because he’s never had any interest in people insulting Jill, not even when she was a child and taught herself to sew her own skirts when her father insisted she wear breeches.

 

It’ll be a war worth fighting, if at the end of it Jill could stop walking around with a spear, even when the world’s at peace, and they wouldn’t have to explain to their son why his mother isn’t like all the mothers sometimes, because nobody’s gotta shave when they’re sick, not even Jill.

 

Until then, if he’s sometimes gotta put on his General Haar attitude and punch somebody, well, why the hell not? The wars might say that they’re over, but some battles, no matter how tired he is of them, have to be fought.

 

**Author's Note:**

> happy summer nagamas silverfoxin \o/
> 
> haar is an unhelpful narrator


End file.
